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hh_mirror((Backdated to just after Henry Winter and Camilla Macaulay's wedding.))
Charles was antsy and bored and wearing a trench in the stone floor of his room from pacing. He needed distraction, somebody to talk to so he could avoid thinking about the honeymoon. Camilla would come back, yes, and his plan could go forward; but for now the fact that she was with Henry, on a honeymoon, was driving Charles crazy. But drink he would not, not after the last time. That just led to mistakes, and Charles refused to make mistakes. Not now. Not this time.
Which mean he couldn't go to Francis. Francis would just encourage him to drink. Or more. More was not a good idea. Richard was out, either - Charles was in no mood to deal with his unrequited melancholy over Camilla. This did not strike him as ironic in the least.
Charles was at a loss: he needed somebody, a friendly face. Someone who could take his mind off of what was likely happening in a hotel room in Mykonos. It occurred to him, somewhat belatedly and after some thought, that there just might be someone who could do that.
Susan. Camilla's friend and maid of honor.
Granted, he'd only just met her, but he'd liked her. Really liked her, not in a sexually predatory way but as a potential friend, and Charles had forgotten how good simple friendship could feel. It had been years since there'd been anyone who was just his friend. She'd seemed to like him, too. Maybe she'd be willing to help take him out of himself, stop him from sabotaging everything he wanted and ruining everything he'd risked.
Maybe she'd know what Camilla was doing.
With this in mind, he sent her an owl, carrying a bag of mini-marshmallows:
Susan,
Come to Hogsmeade with me for some hot chocolate and a change of scenery?
Charles
((Edited for more clarity on Charles' thinking. Shouldn't affect the actual RP at all. :) ))
Charles was antsy and bored and wearing a trench in the stone floor of his room from pacing. He needed distraction, somebody to talk to so he could avoid thinking about the honeymoon. Camilla would come back, yes, and his plan could go forward; but for now the fact that she was with Henry, on a honeymoon, was driving Charles crazy. But drink he would not, not after the last time. That just led to mistakes, and Charles refused to make mistakes. Not now. Not this time.
Which mean he couldn't go to Francis. Francis would just encourage him to drink. Or more. More was not a good idea. Richard was out, either - Charles was in no mood to deal with his unrequited melancholy over Camilla. This did not strike him as ironic in the least.
Charles was at a loss: he needed somebody, a friendly face. Someone who could take his mind off of what was likely happening in a hotel room in Mykonos. It occurred to him, somewhat belatedly and after some thought, that there just might be someone who could do that.
Susan. Camilla's friend and maid of honor.
Granted, he'd only just met her, but he'd liked her. Really liked her, not in a sexually predatory way but as a potential friend, and Charles had forgotten how good simple friendship could feel. It had been years since there'd been anyone who was just his friend. She'd seemed to like him, too. Maybe she'd be willing to help take him out of himself, stop him from sabotaging everything he wanted and ruining everything he'd risked.
Maybe she'd know what Camilla was doing.
With this in mind, he sent her an owl, carrying a bag of mini-marshmallows:
Susan,
Come to Hogsmeade with me for some hot chocolate and a change of scenery?
Charles
((Edited for more clarity on Charles' thinking. Shouldn't affect the actual RP at all. :) ))
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Date: 2007-12-08 04:42 am (UTC)And sometimes unwittingly goofy.
"Scotland in wintertime is enough to make any warm-blooded animal out of sorts," he joked. "I went to college in Vermont. I got to like any and all hot drinks. It's good one of us isn't out of sorts, anyway, at least. I'll admit that Camilla's wedding took a lot out of me." Which was true. "You know, like the day after Christmas. It's a bit of a letdown. All the excitement's over." Which was ... less true. He essayed a sip of his cocoa and found it not so hot as to be rendered undrinkable. "And I have to say I'm a little jealous --" which was true -- "they're soaking up comparatively more sun in Greece, whereas here I'm starting to wonder if the Hat has a spare stash of mittens and scarves anywhere around."
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Date: 2007-12-08 07:09 pm (UTC)She sipped at her cocoa, unwittingly giving herself a marshmallow mustache, which she wiped away somewhat sheepishly. "It was rather...draining, wasn't it? Especially coming so soon after Halloween--were you affected by Halloween, at all? Camilla and Henry didn't even know about it, but some of my friends and I most certainly did." Lucky them. "I hope they're enjoying Greece, at least, even if I don't really even know where that is, either."
(( part 1 of 2 ))
Date: 2007-12-08 11:41 pm (UTC)"Lumos," he muttered, and then something else that sounded vaguely Latinate, and the wand's tip glowed like a cigarette's.
"Right, okay, no one gives a damn if I do this," he said, angling a glance over to the unimpressed bartender and then back to Susan. In the air between them -- low, at their own eye-level, across the table -- he drew a jagged downward line. "The Eastern Seaboard," he said. His brows knit (echo of his sister) with the effort of thinking not only how the inlets and promontories should be placed, but how a mirror image should look. He had to draw it backward to himself, so that it'd be the right way for Susan who faced him. An after-trace of light lingered in the air.
"Now, down here --" roughly around the middle of the line -- "this is Virginia, and that's where Camilla and I grew up. It's part of the American South technically but as you see it's the more northerly reaches of that. Get up around here --" the wand traced a straight line toward the dog-head that was Maine -- "and it's going to be a lot colder. Vermont's here," jabbing the wand with restrained ill-will at an imagined Hampden. "Our college used to close for an extended winter break because of the weather. They say that in Hampden town, some winters, people would get snowed in for weeks. One of our friends stayed in town over the break one year and nearly froze to death."
A quiet counter-charm and the wand's light winked out. Charles tucked the length of pine away, into the inner lining of his jacket, where he'd had a kind of pocket improvised for it by a house-elf. "That probably didn't give you much of an idea of anything, sorry," he said with an apologetic little half-smile (again, so like his sister), "but at least maybe you've got an idea of relative distances involved."
He'd also shown her he knew his way around wandwork. And maybe she'd report it back to Milly, and maybe she wouldn't, but either way, it had to be a little interesting.
(( part 2 of 2 ))
Date: 2007-12-08 11:42 pm (UTC)"What matters is it's south of here, related to us, and therefore not so cold." He tried to keep bitterness out of his voice when he said, "I'm sure they are enjoying themselves." He could picture exactly how much. He could see it behind his eyes, Henry's hands on Camilla's bare white shoulders. The little freckle just below her left breast, a dot of nutmeg on pale cream, that no one was supposed to know about but Charles. "But my sister didn't share the itinerary. Too many wedding details."
Re: (( part 2 of 2 ))
Date: 2007-12-09 03:07 am (UTC)She'd thought the passageway between the Room of Requirement and the Hog's Head was a neat trick, but that definitely trumped it. Susan had never heard of a charm that could do something like that, though it didn't surprise her that there was one. Her eyes traced the lines, turning them into something like a map in her head (complete with a distance key, because she was Susan and therefore weird like that.) Some of the similarities that Charles and Camilla shared--similarities of expression, of mannerisms--were almost unnerving, and she found herself wondering again if it was a trait of all twins, or if they were unique.
"He nearly froze to death?" she asked, looking at the little bright area that was Vermont. "We get snow in Ankh-Morpork--that's the city I live in, back home--but it never usually amounts to more than a foot. People don't tend to freeze to death unless they drink too much and pass out in a back alley somewhere." Which was a fairly common occurrence, especially in the Shades.
She had to translate 'north' and 'south' into something approximating hubwards and windwards, and came to the conclusion that the average temperature might be comparable to that of Genua (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genua), even if the geography wasn't swampland. In that case, Camilla and Henry probably were living it up in Greece, especially compared to everyone still stuck in frozen Scotland.
"How did you do that, anyway?" she asked, sipping her cocoa. "I've never seen a charm like that." She wondered (because she'd fixated on it so long that she had to wonder) what such a thing would look like to someone who'd taken her potion. She was impressed, and impressing Susan was not an easy thing to do.
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Date: 2007-12-09 03:30 am (UTC)Dammit. If she was going to ask him questions about magic, he couldn't get any news out of her about Milly. Patience was not Charles' strong suit.
"I've never been to Greece. Never been anywhere outside North America until I wound up here, by accident. Did Camilla happen to tell you anything about what they'd be doing there?"
He didn't realize Susan was sort of Henry's friend too, or else he'd have tried that angle.
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Date: 2007-12-09 03:56 am (UTC)Camilla hadn't said a great deal, really, though there had been bits here and there. "Apparently, Henry's been to that island before, and he was going to show her around some of the historical sites," Susan said, adding more minimarshmallows. "And they'll probably eat at restaurants with unpronounceable dishes, and automatically know what wine will go with what--I'll tell you one thing, I grew up in the upper classes, but Camilla has more taste in her little finger than I could ever dream of." At times it made her envious (much like Camilla's apparently perfect serenity), but more often than not she just thought it must all be far too much work to remember. "Apparently they've rented some little cottage on the beach, away from the tourists, and they'll be there two weeks."
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Date: 2007-12-09 05:09 am (UTC)"Yeah, Henry's been there before, if I remember correctly. He would have been there, oh, the summer before we met him. He was a sophomore when we were freshmen. Camilla and I never liked traveling, because of the way our parents died, so we'd never been anywhere like that. It sounded terribly exotic. Our teacher -- Julian -- had been almost everywhere in Europe from the sound of it, and other places too, and our friend Francis had been abroad too. So Henry was part of that, and we felt really provincial. Don't let them make you feel that way. They've never been where you're from either," he said warmly.
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Date: 2007-12-09 05:47 am (UTC)She saw nothing amiss with hearing Henry referred to as 'an odd duck'; he really was unusual, and Susan fancied he could be as prickly as she herself, if he wanted. She herself hadn't spoken to him, after the Incident, but given the fact that he and Stephen had actually gone and shot one another (stupid silly boys), it wasn't hard to imagine why someone would call him such. Even yet she had no idea that, but for Stephen's nineteenth-century obstinacy, Henry would have shot her, too, but if someone told her, she'd believe it. She liked him, but he was strange, and not someone you really wanted set against you.
Charles's words made her smile, too--he had hit square on the head a nail she hadn't even properly been aware of. Susan might technically be nobility, and in terms of sheer geography she'd been far more places than the entirety of the Greek class combined, but she did not have--and knew she did not have--that air of distinction, of class. She felt, in a word, common, and not in the way she enjoyed. That Charles could understand that told her that he was rather more like her than them--but then, she'd already inferred that from several little things, particularly his choice of pub. Camilla wouldn't be caught dead in a place like the Hog's Head, if she could avoid it, but it was just the sort of place Susan liked, because it was safely anonymous.
"You know, I was terribly jealous of your sister, once upon a time," she said, not stopping to wonder why she was confiding something like this to a man she had, when all was said and done, just met the other day. "Complete misunderstanding, of course, but at one point I had cause to think I ought to be, and I really was. I eventually decided, once my misconceptions had been straightened out, that it was not her fault she was so attractive, and that she might be worth knowing in spite of it." She took a long sip of her cocoa, warming herself to the tips of her fingers. "It makes me laugh, thinking of that now, but it didn't seem funny at the time. I would never have guessed she'd wind up such a friend."
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Date: 2007-12-09 06:05 am (UTC)"Why were you jealous of Milly?"
The pet name slipped out without thinking.
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Date: 2007-12-09 06:29 am (UTC)The 'Milly' did not go unnoticed--clearly, Charles and Camilla had been close as children, which was understandable. Though she'd never had a sibling herself, Susan had worked with many children who did, and though they could occasionally drive one another mad, they were often really quite devoted to one another. They'd been lucky to have one another, especially having lost their parents.
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Date: 2007-12-09 06:41 am (UTC)"Can't blame you for paranoia. That kind of thing often turns out to be anything but baseless, doesn't it?" He took a deep reflective drink of his cocoa, then licked the corner of his mouth to catch a stray drop. "So what ended up happening? Camilla disavowed any interest in anyone but Henry, and everyone lived happily ever after?"
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Date: 2007-12-09 07:09 am (UTC)His next words nearly made her choke on her cocoa. "Not precisely." There was no way she was going to tell him the real story, but parts of it were acceptable. "It was baseless, but there's no such thing as happily ever after." She dumped the last of the marshmallows into her cup, by way of busying her hands and hiding her expression.
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Date: 2007-12-09 07:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-12-09 07:50 am (UTC)She shook her head, digging her cigarettes out of her pocket, holding the pack out to him in silent offer after she'd extracted one for herself. "Life is much too short to put yourself at other people's mercies. Trust me on that one." She should know, after all. "Ultimately, and I know this sounds terrible, you've got to take care of yourself, because when it comes right down to it, you're the only one who can. Giving too much away can hurt terribly, in the end, so you might as well be a bit selfish and make sure you get what you want, at least sometimes." That was hardly a sentiment one would often find in anyone searching for inner peace, but at the moment at least it had its logic.
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Date: 2007-12-09 07:57 am (UTC)Charles could take care of himself. He'd proven that, over years cut off from the family. Washing dishes, doing whatever it took to keep a roof over his head. He'd have dug ditches if he had to. Henry hadn't had to get his hands dirty a day in his life, not in a way he didn't want. Puttering around in a rose garden wasn't work.
But Camilla couldn't take care of herself. So she felt like she had to latch onto someone like Henry. Before that, Charles had taken care of her. He'd be there for her again, just wait and see.
"Oh, they don't mind if you smoke here, obviously. But I don't partake, not lately. Gave it up for Lent," he said with a faint smile.
No drinking, no smoking. Clean-living Charles.
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Date: 2007-12-09 08:16 am (UTC)She could likely understand, though, that such self-reliance just wasn't possible for Camilla, at least for any extended period of time. Camilla was strong, in her way, but it wasn't the kind of strength that would get you very far in the ordinary world--perhaps it went with that aura of rarified taste. It was almost a kind of fragility, in its own way.
"I can't imagine that," she said, pulling her wand out of her boot to light her cigarette and pausing midway through. "Being one of the ones who can't. You'd be forever at the mercy of other people, which is something I can't even begin to comprehend."
She tucked the pack back into her pocket and actually lit her cigarette. While she didn't know just what Lent was, it sounded like some sort of holiday, so it made sense even if the reference itself was lost. "It's all a matter of give and take, really. So many cultures teach that you should give, always give, and that anything you have for yourself should be given by someone else. What they ought to tell you, and don't, is that there has to be some part of you that's just yours. The people who don't do that are oftentimes the ones who can't make it on their own." Charles might think Camilla couldn't take care of herself, but Susan had a hunch that Henry couldn't hack it without Camilla, either. They were mutually dependent, and Susan now had a relfexive aversion to dependence.
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Date: 2007-12-09 08:35 am (UTC)Somehow the bitterness only hardened his face in a way that made it not at all ugly, only more solid, an appealing hardness that firmed his boyish good looks into something stronger.
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Date: 2007-12-09 08:45 am (UTC)"Ah, but you see," she said, gesturing with her cigarette for emphasis, "we're not alone. We've wisely foregathered with one another, rather than mourn the fact that we're still stuck in dreary Scotland while they're off in the sun. And," she added, eying her cup, "they almost certainly don't have cocoa. With minimarshmallows." Somehow, that really did seem like an immense advantage, and she laughed, quietly. "So in a way we're way ahead of them."
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Date: 2007-12-09 08:52 am (UTC)"Point," he said. "Or rather half a point. Because if Camilla happened to decide on a whim she wanted cocoa, right at this moment, what do you think would happen?"
Henry would probably move heaven and earth to get her some damn cocoa, that was what.
"Still I award you an A for effort," he decided, with a sudden grin. "We have indeed wisely foregathered, and one man's dive is another man's palace. I'd take this place over Madam Puddifoot's any day." Charles didn't know Camilla had in fact gone to Madam Puddifoot's, nor that she'd taken Susan there. He just guessed it would be the kind of place Camilla would want to go. (Admittedly it would also be the kind of place Nana would want to go. But some of Camilla's prejudices had come from Nana, too -- had been in place long before Hampden.)
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Date: 2007-12-09 09:03 am (UTC)"True," she said, upending her mug and wiping away another marshmallow mustache with immense dignity. "And don't even get me started on Madam Puddifoot's. Camilla and I went there for tea, once, sight unseen--I wasn't even really human at the time and I thought it was awful. I think Camilla did, too, though she was much too polite to say so. I've noticed that she's never even remotely rude, but she can get this sort of stricken look, usually when she's confronted with something mind-bendingly awful. Which, believe me, Madam Puddifoot's was. Nobody should be allowed to put ruffles on lampshades."
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Date: 2007-12-09 09:11 am (UTC)"You really did, didn't you?" He couldn't remember the last time he'd laughed this hard. "She made you stay, too, I bet. Couldn't just turn around and walk out when she saw what she'd gotten into."
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Date: 2007-12-09 09:23 am (UTC)no subject
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